The experiment in retreating from "digital fitness tracker / smart watch" to "plain old analog watch" is going well so far.
I think I'm still getting my usual number of steps in per day, and I'm less stressed by a thing on my wrist buzzing every time I get a phone call or text message, telling me about the variations in my heart rate, analyzing my sleep, etc.
If there's a down side, I suppose it's that the newfangled stuff COULD clue me in early to stuff with health implications, but to be honest its main function on that has been to warn me of possible heart arrythmia events that my doctor can't find any trace of and that I suspect are just caused by me startling at night or something. If the watch tracked blood pressure and blood glucose, it might be more useful on that, but I just don't find what it does useful anymore because I don't see sudden changes (over time, my resting heart rate has decreased and my sleep has improved, but both of those plateaued some time ago).
I'm not in any big hurry to get a better watch ... but I'd like to get a better watch band ... and based on what I'm seeing in the watch market, the band I would want would cost about 2/3 of what a decent watch with a band that looks like what I'd want.
When I was growing up, Casio was known for 1) cheap digital watches and 2) cheap music keyboards. Apparently they're all grown up now and make pretty good analog watches, like
this one (not an affiliate link), for about a third of what I thought I'd pay for something like it:
It gets 4.5 stars on more than 13,000 user ratings on Amazon. It's not my perfect watch (I don't need the name on the frame, would probably rather have it just glow in the dark than use a light-up button, and am of two minds about a date window), but it looks fairly nice, allegedly keeps good time, and is reasonably rugged, and I like a hook-and-loop cloth band.
I may grab it the next time I have extra Amazon gift card credit on hand, or cite it when asked what I want for my birthday or Christmas, or find something else as good for the price. But I'm not in a big hurry, especially if the current El Cheapo watch continues to keep good time and the band maybe softens up with age/washing.
